Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall is professor emerita of history at Rutgers University, where she taught Latin American and Caribbean history. She received a B.A. and M.A. in history from the University of the Americas in 1962 and 1963, respectively, and her doctorate in Latin American history from the University of Michigan in 1970.
Her books include Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: A Comparison of St. Domingue and Cuba (1971) [paperback 1996]; Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro- Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1992) [paperback 1995]; Africans in the Americas: Continuites of Ethnicities and Regions (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), and Ethnicity and Race: Slavery and Freedom in French, Spanish, and Early American Louisiana, 1720-1820 (in preparation).
Dr. Hall received numerous awards for Africans in Colonial Louisiana, including the John Hope Franklin Prize, the Elliott Rudwick Prize, the Willie Lee Rose Prize, and the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award. She is also the editor of Love, War, and the 96th Engineers (colored): The New Guinea Diaries of Captain Hyman Samuelson During World War II (1995) [paperback 2000] and Databases for the Study of Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1699 1860 (2000), a CD-ROM publication.
Dr. Hall is an elder of the African Heritage Studies Society and a Guggenheim Fellow. In 1997, she was appointed Chevalier dans l'Order des Arts et des Letters by the government of France and, in 1994, she was the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities's Humanist of the Year.